AIA Guide to Chicago

Laurie Petersen

Publication Year: 2014

An unparalleled architectural powerhouse, Chicago offers visitors and natives alike a panorama of styles and forms. The third edition of the AIA Guide to Chicago brings readers up to date on ten years of dynamic changes with new entries on smaller projects as well as showcases like the Aqua building, Trump Tower, and Millennium Park.Four hundred photos and thirty-four specially commissioned maps make it easy to find each of the one thousand-plus featured buildings, while a comprehensive index organizes buildings by name and architect. This edition also features an introduction providing an indispensable overview of Chicago's architectural history.

Cover

Title page, Copyright Page

Contents

Guide to the Guide

The AIA Guide to Chicago is the largest portable source of information on the
city’s built environment. The book will serve both as an introduction to Chicago’s
architecture for neophytes and as a sourcebook for those seeking to
expand their knowledge beyond the well-documented buildings. The city’s...

Acknowledgements

The cover of this book isn’t big enough to acknowledge all of the people who
contributed to it, so we will do it here. First, we thank the architects, contractors,
craftspeople, tradespeople, and clients who created these structures. If
they had been ordinary, this would be a very small book...

Note From the Preface to the First Edition

This guide should clarify our vision of Chicago. For the past two years, Alice
Sinkevitch has sent into our neighborhoods a dedicated troop of scouts who
have trained themselves to see the city with open minds and keen eyes. There
were a few practicing architects among them, but the majority were amateurs...

Preface to the Third Edition

In the historically crowded working-class Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport,
on the Southwest Side, one of the city’s oldest limestone quarries has
been creatively converted into Palmisano Park. A sloping path leads down to
a lake, where the old quarry walls tower overhead, bringing to mind the ancient...

The Shaping of Chicago

Chicago holds a special place in the history of American cities.
It frequently assumes the role of the great American exaggeration, the
place where common characteristics are stretched to their limits. Other cities
grew during the nineteenth century, but Chicago mushroomed. Every town
had its boosters, but the Windy City’s were obstreperously boastful. Crime and...

Key to Maps

Loop and South Loop

Loop

The Loop is quintessential Chicago! Here the City of Big Shoulders flaunts its
continuing vitality with an unequaled display of dazzling towers and crowded
streets. Jammed with a medley of cars, trucks, buses, and darting pedestrians,
the Loop is an urban canvas framed by its famous El. It is home to banks, national...

South Loop/Chinatown

As one of Chicago’s earliest settlements, the South Loop was among the
first areas to experience the typical urban cycles of prosperity, decay, and
renewal, and it now contains the city’s most intensely polyglot collection of
buildings and neighborhoods. Its shifting boundaries testify to the area’s...

North and Northwest

North Michigan Ave/Streeterville

In a city notable for dramatic transformations, the story of North Michigan Avenue/
Streeterville deserves a special place. It is amazing to contrast a picture
of today’s densely built-up neighborhood with an aerial photograph taken in
1926. Then, apart from a handful of scattered buildings, the roughly square-mile...

River North

River North is the newest name for one of Chicago’s oldest neighborhoods.
In the 1970s, the long-forgotten area north and west of the towers that border
the Chicago River and N. Michigan Ave. featured open blocks of surface
parking in its southeastern sector, with ranks of mill-construction factory and...

Gold Coast/Old Town

Throughout most of their history, the neighborhoods of the Gold Coast and
Old Town presented a sharp contrast between rich and poor, elegance and
squalor. Today, however, their demographics are surprisingly similar. While
many Gold Coast mansions have been replaced by high-rises or subdivided...

Lincoln Park

No other Chicago neighborhood has witnessed as dramatic a resurgence
as Lincoln Park. The 1950 Local Community Fact Book, the city’s decennial
oracle of sociological trends, predicted “the end of much of Lincoln Park as a
residential community.” Today, however, many people see it as the city’s most...

Lakeview/Ravenswood/Uptown

Over time, the North Side communities of Lakeview, Uptown, and Ravenswood
carved themselves out of a much larger government entity, the township of
Lake View. When organized in 1857, Lake View Township extended north
from Fullerton Ave. to Devon Ave. and from the lake to Western Ave. Today...

Edgewater/Rogers Park

The story of Edgewater and Rogers Park is a tale of metamorphosis from genteel
suburb to urban neighborhood. As usual, the catalyst was the extension
of a transit line that made the community more accessible to legions of Loop
office workers. Highway construction brought further changes, turning quiet...

West Town/Wicker Park/Bucktown/Logan Square/Irving Park

The Northwest Side comprises disparate neighborhoods united by the important
artery of Milwaukee Ave. Like many of Chicago’s diagonal streets, it
began as an Indian trail, was developed as a plank road and streetcar route,
and remains a heavily traveled commercial thoroughfare. The many changes...

Chicago-O'Hare International Airport

In June 1942, the federal government bought 1,000 acres surrounding the
small Orchard Place Airport to establish the Douglas Aircraft Co. factory, which
built C-54 transport planes there during World War II. In 1945, an urgent search
to replace Midway Airport, then the world’s busiest, led to this wartime factory
site. Although it was located fifteen miles northwest of the Loop and would require...

West Side and Oak Park

Near West Side

The Near West Side is a patchwork of past and present, with historic blocks
separated by vast stretches of urban renewal and pockets of blight. From a
Civil War–era residence and church to converted industrial lofts and modern
institutional complexes, the area displays the cycles of growth, decline, and...

Garfield Park/Austin

To those traveling from Western Ave. to the city limits—past empty lots, crumbling
six-flats, well-maintained graystones, battered retail areas, and sturdy
churches—the suburban origins of these neighborhoods may seem remote
and invisible. But the area from Western Ave. to Harlem Ave. in Oak Park and...

Oak Park

Arriving in waves after the Chicago Fire, settlers came to Oak Park by the
thousands to build homes: freestanding, sun-filled, hygienic, secure. Fleeing
the city’s crowded, combustible flats and row houses, cholera epidemics, and
corruption, they sought to create a community in harmony with God and with...

Pilsen/Heart of Chicago/Little Village/Lawndale

The communities of Pilsen, Heart of Chicago, Little Village, and Lawndale grew
up with Chicago’s industry, thriving in the 1870s when the city was becoming
an industrial powerhouse and declining a century later as the manufacturing
base withered away. The flats, cottages, and commercial buildings that met...

South and Southwest

Near South Side

The Near South Side offers striking examples of urban renewal on a variety
of scales, from multiacre developments to individual houses. It has some
of the city’s earliest residential neighborhoods, which were also among the
first to be leveled and rebuilt as part of grand schemes in the 1940s. Sandwiched...

Bridgeport/Canaryville/McKinley Park/Back of the Yards

“They were left standing upon the corner, staring; down a side street there
were two rows of brick houses, and between them a vista: half a dozen chimneys,
tall as the tallest of buildings, touching the very sky—and leaping from
them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily, and black as night . . . stretching...

Oakland/Kenwood

The residential development of this area reflects two contrasting ideals: the
urban boulevard house and the country retreat. Chicago’s earliest boulevards
were established just north of Washington Park, and their popularity
with wealthy homeowners set the pattern for other areas. Along the lake...

Hyde Park/South Shore

The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 had a powerful and lasting impact
on Chicago’s urban development, and nowhere were these effects felt as
strongly as in Hyde Park. The enormous annexation of 1889, in which the city
swallowed up huge townships like Lake View, Jefferson, and Hyde Park, was...

Beverly/Morgan Park

If communities still adopted Latin mottos, Beverly–Morgan Park might bill itself
as Suburbia in Urbe. With its towering trees, broad lawns, and sprawling
old houses, it looks more like an affluent North Shore suburb than a Chicago
neighborhood. The hilly topography and winding streets also set it apart from...

Pullman

In 1878, the swampy land now locked between the Dan Ryan and Calumet
Expressways contained a few Dutch farms in the community of Roseland,
high ground along what is now Michigan Ave., and fewer than twenty
houses in the village of Kensington, centering on the railroad junction at...

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